Wikidot Search Launched - Piotr Gabryjeluk

Author

Python, BASH, PHP and JavaScript programmer, Linux fanatic user, and uber-geek.

My name is Piotr Gabryjeluk. I currently work at wikia.com. Previously I worked at Allegro Group, Wikidot.com and several other companies.

I'm blogging mostly about Linux, BASH, Python and geek or funny stuff.

Wikidot Search Launched

02 Mar 2009 21:28

TAGS: dev lucene search wikidot

After about three months of indexing (because Wikidot is BIG) all content that's hosted on Wikidot, the time came to launch the new search system.

I described the system extensively in blog post titled New search for Wikidot's gonna rock.

The new search system replaced the old Google-powered one.

The main advantages over Google Search Engine that has been used till now are:

search in public sites + those you are a member of
semantic search: tags, title are more important when searching
simple to sophisticated queries
- "blog site:community" — search for anything with "blog" in it but only on site community.wikidot.com
- "tags:wikidot site:quake" — search for pages tagged "wikidot" on my site (quake.wikidot.com)
poor quality content filtered

Things left to do:

add site preview (thumbnail) like the one on right to the search results
explain in simple words the search syntax
promote good and/or active sites (give them higher rank)
decrease delay from editing to updating search index (should be max 5 minutes)
create custom search module searching in a bunch of (related) sites — this would be nice if you keep separate sites for different areas of a project like private site for project members and public one for project users. The search is intelligent enough to filter restricted items from search results if someone is not member of the private site the items come from.